The Precise Noise a Heart Makes When Breaking
by DeejayMil
Summary: In the end, he died alone.


In the end, he died alone.

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There was no final case or salient quote to mark his last day.

He spent his concluding hours at a bar with his team, watching them collectively prepare themselves to go home. JJ with her appearance as always perfectly put together, a shield against the things she saw and lived through daily. Morgan, playing his act as always, but the drinks he bought passed slowly through his lips and his eyes never lingered on any girl for long.

Hotch watched his team silently with a blank expression. Rossi pushed him to join in, hiding behind his jovial manner, goading them all into enjoying the moment.

Blake wasn't there. She'd been in a hurry to get home to her husband, her eyes guarded around the team's profiling gazes. Reid could see Gideon's mark on her; the tightness across her mouth that had appeared on Gideon's in his last few months with them. He knew it would only be a matter of time before she too left her gun and credentials with a team member.

Reid laughed and joked with the family that he'd made for himself and eventually went home smiling. "See you Monday, Pretty Boy," Derek had said with a grin, his fingers brushing Reid's coat as the younger agent got up to leave.

Two months earlier, while waiting in line for coffee at his preferred café, Reid had glanced over a report that stated that 28 percent of inhabitants were home at the time of a home invasion. He could still remember with vivid clarity the feel of the paper between his fingers as he skimmed the report, the conversation about a French poodle the woman behind him was having with her phone and the worn smile his barista had greeted him with. He'd tipped her extra just to make that smile reach her eyes.

That was the final statistic Spencer Reid remembered as he stared down the muzzle of the startled intruder's gun.

He fell with the ghost of an earlier grin on his face.

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JJ had loved Spencer since the moment he sat in front of her on the plane and awkwardly asked her on a date. It wasn't the romantic love that poets wrote sonnets about and teenagers sighed over, but it was the love she had thought she'd never have again after her sister died. He was the closest she had ever had to a brother and she knew that she'd love him until the end of her days.

Part of this love was ensuring that he was fed and that had led her to his door on a weekend bearing a slightly overcooked casserole. She knew he wouldn't mind the ashy after-taste to the food, even as she flinched inwardly at offering such poor fare. Her knuckles brushed his door, ready to tap out a shave and a haircut on the dull wood, half-formed apologies on her tongue.

She wasn't prepared for the door to glide open against the slight pressure and taking with it her ability to breathe.

Her heart slammed in her chest as her free hand slipped down to where her gun would normally be holstered. She was an agent first and foremost and everything in her was screaming to go back down to her car and call for help before she entered a crime scene without backup.

She didn't even register that she was already calling it a crime scene as she pushed the door open and walked in on legs that moved robotically.

She knew he was dead the moment she set eyes on him. Never in life had Spencer Reid allowed his body to sprawl with such ungainly relaxation, one arm thrown back over his head and his spine against the side of his couch. JJ could see the silent curve of his neck shadowed by the early morning light flickering through the light curtains. She imagined skimming her fingers along that pale skin, searching for a pulse. She knew exactly what it would look like as he'd open his eyes and blink sleepily at her, an expression so familiar to her she almost vomited with the pain of it.

She carefully placed the casserole on the side table, pushing aside his wallet and a neat stack of junk mail to do so. Reid disliked mess in his apartment and while she did so she could pretend that her friend was slouched like that on the floor as a joke, something they'd laugh about later.

He would turn his head, laughing in the overloud, joyous way of his, and that horrible silent curve of his neck would be broken by his movement. She would walk over to meet him, punching him in the arm as recompense for scaring her in such a manner before pulling him into a hug so she could feel the warm beat of his heart as she remembered how to go on without him.

Somehow time had continued to tick on with her sitting silently next to his body. Her warm hand enclosed his cold wrist as she waited for the joke to be over and his pulse to thrum under her fingers; her other hand pressed against the wound in his neck that had taken his life.

Eventually she would call Hotch and he would take the stairs at a run, half dressed and panting with fear as he tried to process her half-unintelligible call. He found her still sitting next to her brother and friend, trying to hold his life inside him. He couldn't tell who the blood belonged to and the panic in his eyes must have shown.

Dull blue eyes met his as he staggered to a stop. "He's not bleeding anymore, Hotch. He's not bleeding, so he'll be okay. He'll be okay."

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Derek Morgan bore the plain dark oak coffin stoically and knew that no burden he ever carried again would be so heavy.

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Rossi broke the nose of the man who'd killed their youngest agent. Afterwards, he washed the man's blood from his face and hands while avoiding away washing the tears. The man had killed Spencer because he'd interrupted a desperate robbery. He'd simply come home just a little too early.

If he'd stayed for one more drink that night, he'd be alive. Rossi couldn't understand how it was possible to hold all the opportunities of that night in his head and not go mad. So many paths that could have been taken to avoid Spencer going home to his death.

He didn't know who the tears were for, but he didn't try to stop them.

 **.**

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Mateo Cruz eventually took it upon himself to clean out the lonely desk in the bullpen as two months went by with every agent studiously avoiding looking at it.

He placed a box down with "Property of Spencer Reid" meticulously stencilled on the side and carefully began placing items within it. Ten minutes in, he'd only managed to place three items in the box, a haphazard pile of paper rubbish in the bin next to him, and he'd gained an audience.

When he put a battered coffee mug with a chip on the handle in the box, JJ slid a slow hand across from her desk, averted her eyes from his and took it, cupping it in her palms like it was precious. Perhaps it was. Cruz nodded gently at her and kept going, as though it was every day the Section Chief cleaned out his agents' desks.

A well-thumbed book of poetry had barely even touched the box before Rossi scooped it up, turning it over curiously as he perched on JJ's desk. He spoke, almost to himself. "A book that's been read over and over again, even though the reader could recite it from memory after the first read. Interesting."

Cruz nodded silently at the older profiler, not trusting himself to form words around the tightness forming in his throat. He hated losing agents but he had lost them before, countless times. Somehow, faced with the inexorable personality of Spencer Reid and surrounded by the wordless grief of his team, it was crueller than it had ever been.

When a soft hiss sounded by his right side as he opened the top drawer and revealed a hastily tied bundle of letters, he merely moved his hand back and allowed Morgan to pick up the bundle. They would both ignore the way that Morgan's hands shook as he ran his fingers over the carefully printed words.

A small figurine of a phone box with a keychain attached moved from the box to Garcia's office in record time.

A notebook with Reid's frantic, cramped handwriting spilling throughout found its new home in Hotch's bottom drawer, along with two drawings that Jack had made and a photo of a younger Sean.

Blake had taken nothing but when Cruz finally reached the bottom drawer and pulled it open to reveal a jumble of various sweets and bars, most of Reid's favourite flavours (and a few that he had known his team loved), she had made a noise that Cruz would describe as the precise noise a person made when their heart broke.

He worked late that night, his eyes occasionally flickering up to glance at the single lone chess piece he had found loose in one of Doctor Reid's drawers. He didn't know why he had taken it, he was no closer with Reid than he was with the majority of his agents, but something had possessed him to pocket the piece.

A Queen. There was only one on each side, and you could win without her, but her loss was a devastating blow that many players never recovered from.

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When Henry dressed up for Halloween that year in the same costume as the year before even though he'd outgrown it, JJ had cried and cried until she fancied that the sobs would tear her chest open and let all the pain she'd been building out.

When her son had eventually gotten over the fright of her unplanned breakdown, he had crawled into her arms. He sobbed that he was sorry, that he'd never meant to hurt her and he promised to never wear the costume again if she'd only stop crying.

JJ held him and murmured things that might have been words to him to calm him down, all the while feeling her world slipping out of her control.

Later that night it was her turn to be held as Will promised that even if something happened to her, he would never allow Henry to forget his godfather.

Sometimes she wished she could forget him.

 **.**

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Garcia ran her fingers over the framed photo of Spencer on the wall of the BAU every morning, even though doing so felt like admitting he was gone.

She never told anyone but after Emily there was always that little bit of hope and slow cases inevitably led her to cautiously run checks on databases across the world, hoping one day for a hit.

She never quite believed that she'd never see him again, but she did smile less.

 **.**

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No one ever talked about Hotch travelling to Vegas in the days before the funeral to tell Diana Reid about her son.

No one ever brought up the haunted expression in his eyes when he returned.

And they certainly never brought up that the exorbitant costs of her care continued to be paid as promptly as they had when Spencer Reid had been alive to earn a pay-check from the FBI, even when Morgan found a receipt for the payment shoved hastily among a pile of casefiles on David Rossi's desk.

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Life was a little emptier now. Before it had been punctuated with physics magic in the bullpen and impromptu movie nights. Now, for Morgan, it included retrospective visits to a mute headstone in Vegas and nights spent watching old black and white films from Reid's collection.

He regretted that he'd never taken up Reid's suggestions to watch them with him when he'd been alive.

Blake had left and no one was surprised.

He bought a copy of Rossi's latest book and read only the dedication in the front. His mother fussed over him and his sister's expressed sympathies that he knew they didn't quite believe themselves. After all, how hard could he grieve for a man he'd just worked with? Surely the pain couldn't cut that hard.

Sometimes he wasn't sure if he was grieving, or if he was guilt-ridden with the knowledge that Reid had died alone.

Life went on in a way that he could have never believed it would the day they buried their Doctor.

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 _In memory of Doctor Spencer Reid,_

 _The words of Mahatma Ghandi state, "_ _You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them."_

 _This isn't true. You were always important, and always loved._

 _Thank you._

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In the end, we all die alone.


End file.
